It amazes me how predictable the enemy can be. Don’t get me wrong it is still war and when all is said and done we know for whom the bell tolls in the end. But to be able to see his grubby fingerprints on the weapons he forms against us is some times laughable, which I bet is not the response he was looking for. So, sit back, get a cup of coffee, and get ready to ready a little testimony on who the Lord cut off the latest attempt by the enemy to attack us while we were on the fast.

As many of us do, we have a cell phone plan. On the plan, we have several phones including a phone for my brother and his family. It just made things easier when they were moving down here to get a cell phone with a local number to here and then send it to them. This way they could give everyone the new number as well as have a phone with them when they were traveling. After arriving here, we just let them keep the phone because it is much cheaper for him to be on my plan then to go and get a phone by himself.

I happened to get paid on Thursday and paid the bill for the phones. As it happened, the bill cycled on Friday and the new charges were there. So, when I pulled up the account, I was a bit surprised to see that there was an amount due, but I was even more surprised to see what the amount due was. It was almost three times our normal cell phone bill having an additional $194 in charges. Well, the first thing I did was pull up the bill online and take a look at where the charges were coming from. After researching the bill, I discovered that supposedly my brother’s cell phone had been surfing the internet all on one day for the entire amount in question. You can imagine my surprise because we had an agreement not to use the phone for such things because of the cost. I was not happy. I spoke with my wife and we decided to discuss this with my brother. I will be honest here in that God prevented me from being able to DISCUSS this my brother at this time because it would have been a much different DISCUSSION if I had.

Evening fell, thunk (sorry, had too), and I had left work and finished running errands and gave my brother a call to stop on by. He was home and came over. My wife and I at this point were in good spirits and prayed before we entered because we had time to realize that this was an attack from the enemy and we didn’t want to see the enemy gain any ground. We entered their apartment and after several moments of settling their kids explained the situation. My brother was not happy because he felt accused, and understandably so, and fell into his DISCUSSION mode. However, his wife, my wife and I were all in the same spirit and therefore it was easy to speak to him in love and bring him down and diffuse any situation that could have happened. Furthermore, we were able to pray together that God would turn this around and somehow take care of this charge by either removing it or providing the money. What the enemy had meant to come between us, God turned into a praise and prayer session and Glory to God!

I just want to take a moment and say how important this is before I go on with what happened and what God did. Because two years ago my brother barely spoke to me, but God did during the last time I did a 21 day Daniel fast and told me that I needed to pray for my brother and his family daily because something big was coming but that God was already preparing for it and that following that they would move down here. Six months later, I get a call that my brother was in the hospital in New York, I am in Texas, and the doctors were saying they were going to take his foot. I told my brother don’t you believe what they say and wait to hear what the Lord says. The Lord said he would only lose a pinky toe. Seven months later, they were moving down here and stayed with us several months before getting a place of their own. Now, they are active members of our church and on fire for God and I would not trade our relationship together and in Christ for anything especially a few hundred dollars. I praise God for what he has done and continues to do in my extended family

Well, I had stopped by the AT&T store last night to ask about the charges to better understand them and they told me that I could call customer service and get a block put on the phone. So, I call them today to put the block on the phone for those type of charges. While I was on the phone the representative asked me if I would like him to remove the charges for me since I have been such a good customer and this was obviously some kind of one time error or mishap. I told him I would greatly appreciate it if he would and then he proceeded to do so. So, God removed the charges from the phone, keep my relationship intact, turned what could have been a bad meeting into a praise and prayer sessions with my brother, and is now getting all the glory. PRAISE GOD! We really do serve an awesome God!

As for our enemy, it is not long now before the bell will toll for him and he will be swimming for all eternity in the lake for fire. Between now and then he can go back to hell where he belongs because MY GOD REIGNS!!

Tags: bell, bill, brother, cell, daniel, fast, god, phone, Praise Reports, tolls

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 17th, 2009 at 2:06 pm and is filed under Prayer Requests. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.